The Trump administration has stumbled onto a chance to help rid medicine of radical ideology. On July 14, the Department of Health and Human Services began soliciting ideas for reforming Medicare’s physician payment system. It’s a massive and complicated undertaking that would have seismic effects on medicine, and it’s worth pursuing for another reason: It would likely force the American Medical Association—the most powerful medical group in the country—to focus on representing physicians and improving medicine, not harming patients by advocating race-based politics and gender ideology.
Combating ideology isn’t necessarily the Trump administration’s goal, but the issue is unavoidable given how Medicare payments work. Physicians use billing codes that come from the Current Procedural Terminology system, which the AMA developed in the 1960s. The AMA holds the copyright, so it earns licensing royalties when the codes are used.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.